Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance

by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in  stri-vesam  is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance. 

246 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2019

Reviews

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing in Hyderabad in a world where Kuchipudi is characterised as one of "our cultural assets" and in a household with Kuchipudi students, I never paused to have a look at the remarkable fabric of the dance form. It emerged in a particular social niche: Brahmin men of the Kuchipudi village but has come to become a middle class women's dance form and strikingly transnational presence owing to the ever-growing ambitious community of the Telugu NRI. The dance simultaneously adopts momentum from and differs with other dance systems like the Bharatanatyam (their visual similitudes urged Rukmini Devi Arundale to call it a subset of the latter and). Building on work done on other forms coupled with her own lived experience and finally, the anthropological method of participant observation, the author writes a social and aesthetic history of Kuchipudi. She poses some very curious questions on authorhood in a dance form, the sudden expansion of the village to be forced to find niches on the international stage, and the assertion of masculinity in a dance form filled with impersonations as women. My favourite chapter ought to be on Vempati Chinna Satyam's intervention in Kuchipudi and his ultimate role in manufacturing the dance as it stands today. It is here that the author manages to display how far on the field she had gone to understand and depict the dance form.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

About Kuchipudi Bramin male (and female) dancers. Kinda raced through it for class.

[daniel dillon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent ethnography of a theoretically compelling community and practice, but the author's insistence on framing brahmin masculinity as constructed artifice too easily dismisses the power structures that can and will preserve a tradition of masculine "impersonation" even as more women and queer performers occupy the stage.

[Pradeep Narayanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an amazing piece of work. Very indepth analyses of Maya, of intersectionality of caste and gender, and artforms and the way art gets appropriated. A must read for students of politics of art and culture.